"Señor and Señora Perez have the honor to advise their sorrowing friends and business associates that little Willie Perez, aged six, went up to heaven at 7:32 last evening."
There is nothing like being exact and punctual in these little matters.
Toward sunset, after the siesta, it is not merely à la mode but good sense to stroll down to the banks of the Guadalquivir by the Golden Tower and drift an hour or two back and forth along the deep-shaded Alameda. There one will be in the best company in Seville--and the worst; for all the city is there, lolling in its carriage or pattering along the gravel in its hempen sandals.
But it is only at night that Seville is wholly and genuinely awake and approaches somewhat to that fountain of joy her inhabitants would have the world believe her. Then at last does she shake off entirely the daytime lassitude. The noises of the day are all there, the street-hawkers have gained a hundredfold in volume of lung, in number, and in activity, the cathedral bells seem twice as loud. Toward nine all the city and his wife and children and domestics are gathered or gathering in the great focal point, the palm-fringed Plaza San Fernando. The attractions are several. First of all is the "cinematagrafo," a moving-picture machine throwing its mirth and puerility on a sheet suspended in the center of the plaza. Second, a military band, not a caterwauling of strange noises that one would desire suppressed by fire or earthquake, but a company seriously and professionally engaged in producing genuine music, which it does from near nine till after midnight as continuously as any band could be expected to until some invention makes it possible to blow a trombone and smoke a cigarette at one and the same time. Third, there is the excitement which the mingling together in crowds brings every Latin people, and the supreme pleasure of strolling to and fro admiring one another and themselves. Fourth, if so many excuses are needed, there is fresh air and the nearest approach to coolness that the city affords.
Yet with all Seville gathered the thousand roped-off chairs around the curtain are rarely half filled; for to sit in one costs a "fat dog," as the Spaniard facetiously dubs his Lacedemonian two-cent piece. But what a multitude in the rest of the square! Out of doors all Spain mixes freely and heartily. Hidalgos with the right to conceal their premature baldness from Alfonso himself shudder not in the least at being jostled by beggars; nay, even exchange with them at times a few words of banter. Silly young fops, in misfit imitation of Parisian style, a near-Panama set coquettishly over one ear, trip by arm in arm, swinging their jaunty canes. Workingmen scorning such priggishness stride slowly by in trim garments set off by bright red fajas in which is stuck a great navaja, or clasp-knife of Albacete. Rich-bosomed majas with their black masses of mane-like hair, in crimson skirts or yellow--as yellow as the gown of Buddha--drift languorously by with restless fan. No type is missing from the strolling multitude. Strolling, too, it is, in spite of the congestion; for the slow tide-like movement of the throng not only gives opportunity but compels any lazy foreigner to walk whether he will or not. Everyone is busy with gallantry and doing nothing--doing it only as the Spaniard can who, thanks to temperament, climate, and training knows that peerless art and follows it with pleasure, not with the air of one who prefers or pretends to prefer to be working.
The Sevillian is in many things, above all in his amusements, a full-grown child. Groups of portly business men, Seville's very captains of industry, sit hour by hour watching the unrolling of just such films, as are shown in our "nickelodeons," shouting with glee and clapping each other on the shoulder when a man on the screen falls off a chair or a baker's boy deluges a passerby with flour. No less hilarious are the priests, shaking their fat sides with merriment at the pictured discomfiture of one of their guild in eager pursuit of some frail beauty. As interested as the rest are the policemen--and as little engaged in the fulfillment of their duties, whatever those may be. A poor species, a distressingly unattractive breed are these city policemen of Spain, in their uniform closely resembling checkerboard pajamas, lacking even the Hibernian dignity of size, stoop-shouldered and sunken-chested with lounging on their spines and the inordinate sucking of cigarette smoke into their lungs. Of the self-respect and pride of office characteristic of the national guardia civil they have none whatever. I recall no evening in the Plaza San Fernando that at least one pair of these wind-broken, emasculate caricatures of manhood did not fall to quarreling, dancing in rage and shrieking mutual curses in their smoke-ruined voices, while the throng dogged them on.
Families gather early in the plaza. There ensues a moment or two of idle thrumming--for father or brother is certain to bring his guitar--then out bursts the sharp, luring fandango; the little girls in snowy white squirm a moment on their seats, spring suddenly out upon the gravel, and fall to dancing to the click of their castanets as rhythmically as any professionals. They do not dance to "show off," they are indeed rarely conscious of attracting attention; they dance because the fire in them compels, because they wish to--and what the Andalusian wishes to do he does then and there, gloriously indifferent to whoever may be looking on. Let him who can imagine an American bringing his guitar to the public square of a large city and, surrounded by thousands, play serenely on into the depths of the night.
A Sevillian street
The Andalusian is one of the most truly musical beings on earth, in the sense that his music expresses his real emotions. Song is almost his natural mode of expression, always spontaneous, with none of the stiffness of learned music. He has no prelude, follows no conscious rules, displays none of that preliminary affectation and patent evidence of technic that so frequently makes our northern music stilted and unenchanting. He plunges headlong into his song, anywhere, at any time, as a countryman unsullied by pedantry enters into conversation.